


Job Descriptions

by swooning



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3703937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swooning/pseuds/swooning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura Roslin ponders her new-found leisure after leaving New Caprica on the Galactica. Spoilers through end of season 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Job Descriptions

The irony was, in some ways that time on New Caprica was the happiest she’d been in years. Oh, naturally, there were the hardships. The tent city life, the incessant political squabbling, the niggling irritation of watching Baltar frak things up… because they had made the wrong choice.   
  
But on the other hand, Laura was once again doing what she loved most, which was teaching. She had missed it every day for the past fifteen or so years, missed the kids, though she had let Richard convince her she could do more for them through politics than she ever could in the classroom. “The classroom,” he said in a patronizing way, the same way people said, “a teacher,” when they discussed her fitness for the presidency. Obviously, anyone who said this had never had to manage a room full of small children for six hours at a stretch, and not only manage them but lead them to learn a little something. Her teaching and behavior management skills were wasted on the presidency, frankly. And she had to let the Quorum of Twelve get away with things she would have never tolerated from her students.   
  
But on New Caprica, she had been able to indulge in her passion once more, and she had thrown herself into establishing a school before her own tent was even pitched. She rounded up more teachers, of course, encouraged Tyrol and some of the other skilled tradespeople to make apprentices of the teenagers, strongarmed Baltar into making some sort of effort to allocate funds. But aside from occasional meetings to discuss supplies and curriculum, she now steered clear of organizing and focused her efforts on her own one-tent schoolhouse.   
  
It was such a relief, to stretch and flex these mental muscles after such a long dormancy. She had assessed the children’s skills, determining who would need extra help with what, and set about meeting their needs with an energy she had never been able to muster for politics. She pushed politics even more firmly behind her when she took Maya in; yes, she had the half-cylon baby, but she had also turned out to be a highly trained reading tutor. So she stayed on, the baby stayed on, and the students had begun to learn. And to love learning, which was the most important lesson. It was taxing, it was thankless, and it was bliss every day as far as Laura Roslin was concerned. In her drafty tent, she had fallen asleep grading papers each night and slept the sleep of the just.   
  
But now… now, she found herself back on Galactica, and facing a dilemma she had never actually experienced; she did not actually have a specific job to do.  
  
Well, obviously, there were a great many things  _to be done._  The children might not have classes during this crisis, but she still checked on them regularly. She just wasn’t really “the teacher” now. There was the rescue of the rest of the humans to plan, which took them all some time each day. But she wasn’t really “the President” now – despite what some seemed to think. It didn’t work that way. And even when new elections were held, in due time, she wasn’t sure she would run.  
  
The trouble was, she really wasn’t  _anything_  at the moment. Except Bill’s lover, which raised a whole new set of issues she didn’t care to explore just yet.   
  
Laura sat on Bill’s couch, thinking about her life and how she had arrived here, at a place where the role she should find easiest, most fundamental, seemed the most impossible for her. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to find someone; there were nights, though not in many years, she had sobbed herself to sleep over her loneliness. But when had she ever had the time? Caring for her traumatized mother after her father and two sisters were killed in an auto accident. She was only fifteen at the time, she hadn’t even started dating in earnest. Attending high school, then college, always working on the side to supplement the meager survivor’s benefit from her father’s teaching pension. She came home from school and work exhausted, and if one or more boys had tried to distract the beautiful but driven young woman from her daily tasks, she was simply too tired to notice or care. In college, her two attempted relationships had both disintegrated within months; the sex, at which she excelled as she did at everything she set her mind to, could not compensate for her essential absence. She was just too busy.   
  
Those habits had stood her in good stead professionally, however, throughout her career in education. Long before the regional Teacher of the Year award that brought her to Mayor Adar’s notice, Laura had been quietly but firmly exceeding all expectations, in her classroom, her campus, her city district. Winning awards, winning grants, serving tirelessly on committees, and fundraising brilliantly (the real reason, she suspected, Adar wanted to co-opt her for his gubernatorial campaign). There had been a few more attempts. A fellow teacher who decided to move back to Virgon before things had really gotten serious. A handsome but petty district-level administrator, who would later spearhead the attempt to discredit her work as Secretary of Education with a spurious corruption charge.   
  
And, of course, there had been Richard. Married, ambitious, charismatic Richard. For twelve years, their platonic relationship had been borne along by an undercurrent of almost-flirting, of shared in-jokes, of knowing one another’s favorite foods, color, drinks, and side of the bed, long before the question of sharing a bed was ever seriously entertained. Only after her appointment to the cabinet had he made a move – late one night in his office, of course, rather unromantically reassuring her that there was no quid pro quo involved. Which was patently untrue, of course; there is  _always_  a quid pro quo, and even Laura knew that much. She nearly said no, then, but found she lacked the energy to resist. It had been years, she had worked so hard for so long, and Richard Adar was not only attractive and interested, he was just downright convenient. That he was married seemed somehow less important than it once would have. She was in her late forties by then; she had grown accustomed, now, to being alone, and didn’t require his company outside the confines of work. She preferred her solitude, really. The sex was just something they did, an itch they scratched so it didn’t distract them, it didn’t actually change their relationship in any meaningful way. She told herself.   
  
Of course, ultimately the final word on their impending breakup – irrevocably linked to her impending forced resignation – and any emotional fallout thereof had been pre-empted by the Cylons. Nothing like a thermonuclear holocaust to take the pressure off ending a relationship. She owed the Cylons, if she looked at it from that angle; maybe she would factor that in, the next time she was deciding whether or not to flush one out the airlock.   
  
Not that she was in a position to decide such things now. Because now, her only real job on Galactica was the one she had no experience in: being Adama’s lover. Sharing his quarters, which was not as stifling as she had feared. Although she had no more belongings to get mixed in with his, the natural accumulation of their things occurred together now, instead of separately, and they joked when their papers or books wound up shuffled together; they argued good-naturedly over who had run the point down on a pencil, but either would offer to fill the other’s glass if it were empty. She was able to catch up on her reading, as well. Being there when he got off duty, asking him about his shift… it was nice, but it was unreal. As was the sex, which was unhurried, and had no agenda other than their mutual enjoyment. Making love, she ventured to call it to herself. A quid pro quo she would gladly accept.   
  
What would it lead to? Not marriage – she had gotten to her fifties without marrying, and he had been single for almost two decades now following his second divorce (those relationships also fallen victim to the lack of time); she didn’t really see either of them wanting to bother with a formality. Besides, the recurrent waking nightmare of Ellen Tigh asking her to co-found an Officers’ Wives’ Club was enough to make her run screaming from the very idea of marriage.   
  
One advantage of having been President, she mused, was that at least nobody overtly treated her like the Admiral’s doxy. Slim comfort, as she felt she was, to a small extent, precisely that.   
  
Which probably wouldn’t bother her to this degree, she knew, if she weren’t enjoying it quite so much.


End file.
